the desks;" and the theatrical "Cato," a reminiscence of which was supplied by "She describes the cast of Mary Lamb. the characters even now with relish. Martha, by the handsome Edgar Hickman, who afterwards went to Africa, and of whom she never afterwards heard tidings; Lucia, by Master Walker, whose sister was her particular friend; Cato, by John Hunter, a masterly declaimer, but a plain boy, and shorter by a head than his two sons in the scene," &c. This is charming, and in Lamb's freest, gayest manner. The whole paper should have been in Elia, just before the Christ's Hospital.

Later on he furnishes a little ramble, "In re Squirrels," beginning-"Be it remembered that C. L. comes here and represents his relations," asking, "what is gone with the cages, with the climbing squirrel, and bells to them, which were formerly the indispensable appendage to the outside of a tinman's shop, and were, in fact, the only live signs? One, we believe, still hangs out on Holborn; but they are fast vanishing with the good old modes of our ancestors."

A correspondent, Tim Tims, gossiping about the ass, brings out Lamb again to plead for this suffering servant. Nature did prudently "in furnishing him with a tegument impervious to ordinary stripes. His back offers no mark to a puny foeman. To a common whip or switch his side presents an absolute insensibility. His jerkin is well fortified. Contemplating this natural safeguard, his fortified exterior, it is with pain I view the sleek, foppish, combed, and curried person of this animal, as he is transmuted and disnaturalized at watering places, &c., where they affect to make a palfrey of him. Fie on all such sophisticating. It will never do, Master Groom! Something of his honest shaggy exterior will peep up in spite of you-his good, rough, native pineapple coating."

Pineapple coating! How truly after Lamb's mind, the deceit in suggesting an agreeable image, which, on a second's reflection, shows as quite a different idea. Nothing, too, is more remarkable in him than his airy and special use of the "&c." Next, we have a little snatch of verse, called "Rural Musings:"

'To see the sun to bed and to arise, Like some hot amorist with glowing eyes, Bursting the lazy bands of sleep that bound him,

With all his fire and traveling glories round him."

But, surpassing these specimens is a little scene in the second volume, which shows us Lamb himself in one of his best attitudes, at a stall, "Rummaging over the contents of an old stall, at a half book, half old iron shop, in 94, Alley, leading from Warden-street to Soho, yesterday, I lit upon a ragged duodecimo, which had been the strange delight of my infancy. The price

demanded was sixpence, which the owner (a little squab duodecimo of a character himself) enforced with the assurance that his own mother should not have it for a farthing less. On my demurring to this extraordinary assertion, the dirty little vendor re-enforced his assertion with a sort of oath, which seemed more than the occasion demanded: 'and now (said he) I have put my soul to it.' Pressed by so solemn an asseveration, I could no longer resist a demand which seemed to set me, however unworthy, upon a level with his dearest relations; and, depositing a tester, I bore away the tattered prize in triumph." It turned out a delusion, but he thought it would have been a treat for "friend HONE." Another instance of Lamb's tender delicacy, as he knew Hone had been already pleased at being called "friend" by him.

He is again"brought out" by an allusion to Sir Jeffrey Dunstan, whom he had met and seen at his dwelling. "A strong odor of burnt bones, I remember, blending with the scent of horse-flesh reeking into dog's meat, and only relieved a little by the breathings of a few brick-kilns, made up the atmosphere." This is one of Lamb's wonderful "gatherings" of oddness; and even the quaint position of the word "I remember," is worthy of study. "If a few boys followed him," he goes on, "it seemed rather from habit than in expectation of fun.

What faults he had I know not. I have heard something of a peccadillo or so. But some little devia

In the Table Book" he wrote the well-known "Specimens," and his little note to "friend Hone," introducing them, is in his own airy key. "Imagine," he says, speaking of himself in the British Museum, "the luxury to one like me

of sitting in the princely apartments, for such they are, of poor condemned Montague House, which I predict will not be speedily followed by a handsomer; and calling at will the flower of some thousand dramas. It is like having the range of a nobleman's library, with the librarian to your friend." (Mark, to your friend.) "Nothing can exceed the courteousness and attentions of the gentleman who has the chief direction of the reading-rooms here; and you have scarce to ask for a volume before it is laid before you." These were happy days indeed for the readers.

We may stop here a moment, to put side by side with this sketch a little note which I have found in an old Gentleman's Magazine. The editor then perfectly remembered Charles sitting there, and making his extracts, and Miss Lamb "doing us the honor of showing us her brother's MSS. previous to publication." He also recollected "her incredulity and good-natured peevishness," when he informed her that he also possessed most of the plays from which Lamb had so laboriously made his selection. It was scarcely good-natured information.*

There is a letter addressed to Charles Lamb on the score of the "Turk in Cheapside," recommending the oriental as a subject. The imitation is good. "Methinks you would handle the subject delightfully. They tell us he is gone." But he did not accept the invitation. He also took up an ambiguous question on Maid Marian-wrote a bit of fairy imagery on the Defeat of Time.

The reckless coterie in young Blackwood were a little embarrassed between their admiration of one who was after their own heart, and their political fury against the "crew" to which he belonged. They were nettled at Hunt's rude admiration of him. "Charles Lamb," he wrote, in 1818, "a single one of whose speculations on humanity is worth all the half-way-house gabblings of critics on the Establishment." This strange phrase infuriated them; yet they found out excuses for Lamb. "Probably his good nature," they wrote, "endures their quackery." But later a pseudo Doctor Petre wrote a furious letter on some paper in the London, not knowing it to be Elia's: calling, too, the paper on "April Fools," "columns of mere inanity and very cockneyism." In the" Noctes" they discussed the magazines of the day, and Buller asks-"Taylor and Hessey's Magazine-is it better?"

TICKLER.

"Sometimes much better and often much

worse. Elia in his happiest mood delights

me; he is a fine soul; but when he is dull,

his dullness sets human stupidity at defiance. He is like a well-bred, ill-trained pointer. He has a fine nose; but he won't or can't range. He keeps always close to your foot, and then he points larks and tit-mice."

By-and-by he was on the staff, and was dotting its pages with little delicate sonnets, signed with his delicate "C. L." Some of them are not included in his collected works, as the "lines written in consequence of hearing of a young man that had voluntarily starved himself to death on Skiddaw." But a more important contribution, which I think has not been enough noticed, is one entire farce, which figures a little inappropriately in one of the numbers. It is called "The Pawnbroker's Daughter." The plot, it must be said, is a little forced, and the humor rather in the tone of the old dramatists. It turns upon a pawnbroker's daughter running away; and on a senti

*They only want a word or touch of correction here and there (which he himself would have furnished) when the same word reads too closely.

and "impertinents" came to stare, because many were eager to get admission, and to say that they had spent "an evening with the Lambs." Further, that the host himself was a stupid, unentertaining sort of man; and his sister used to "bustle and pother about like a gentle housewife, to make everybody comfortable;" but that "you might as well have been in the apartments of any other clerk of the India House, for anything you heard that was deserving of note or recollection." With the common run of people he was odd, extravagant, grotesque, and unnatural; as Hazlitt said, "always on a par with his company, whether high or low." But to see the true man, we should see him with one or two dear friends, when, we are told, he was perfectly natural, and made no violent puns or strange speeches. Strangers, there fore, generally took away with them an impression as of something odd and buffooning, and even disagreeable.

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One of his most delightful letters is to this Mr. Patmore:-"Dear P.," it ran, "I am so poorly. I have been to a funeral, where I made a pun, to the consternation of the rest of the mourners. And we had wine. I can't describe to you the howl which his widow set up at proper intervals. O, I am so poorly. I waked it at my cousin's, the book-binder, who is now with God; or if he is not, it's no fault of mine.

"We hope the French wines do not disagree with Mrs. Patmore. By the way, I like her. Christ-how sick I am!—not of the world, but of the widow's stout.

"She's sworn under £6,000; but I think she perjured herself. No shrimps! (That's in answer to Mary's question about how her soles are to be done.). What you mean by poste restante God knows. Do you mean I must pay the postage? Proctor has got a wen growing out of the nape of his neck, which his wife wants him to have cut off; but I think it rather an agreeable excrescence." These are only scraps out of a most wonderful letter full of a boisterous and delightful extravagance.†

• Patmore.

This letter is not given in "Talfourd."

From the same source we learn some traits of Lamb really characteristic-how, when he boarded with a sort of "saveall," Mrs. Leishman, at Enfield, who "screwed" every penny out of him that boarding could screw. She, on settling day, made a charge of sixpence for the extra sugar that Wordsworth put in his tea. How he told of his embarrassment when a poetical youth in the country, corresponding with him, enclosed his miniature; and, above all, what seems to be a genuine trait of his nature and habits: —a friend would come in, not opportunely, and find Lamb, as in "The Fraser Sketch," with his folio "tilted up" before him, revelling in, say Sir Thomas Brown or old Davenent: it would be a friend whom he would be really glad to see; yet it was an interruption; he would have preferred going on with Sir Thomas Brown; and his anxiety to disguise any appearance of this "unwelcome" made him fidgety, and bustling, and unnaturally hospitable. This is quite conceivable. A cento of stories was submitted to him in MSS.; and his marginalia are very pleasant. Thus:"Pleasurable.' No word is good that is awkward to spell." "Looking like a heifer' I fear would do in prose. I should prefer garlanded with flowers, as for a sacrifice,' and cut the cow altogether." "Apathetic.' Vile word." 'Mechanically.' Faugh! insensiblyinvoluntarily-in-anythingly, but mechanically!" Reaction' is vile slang." "Physical. Vile word."*

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Thomas Moore met Lamb two or three times at breakfast and dinner; and it is amusing to see the "not bad!" air of patronage and doubtful approbation with which the poet received his efforts. He plainly considered him a jester, a little above Hood or Hook. He introduced him at a Mr. Monkhouse's, an amphytrion, who was glad to furnish good dinners and perfect silence for the pleasure of having such men at his table. Wordsworth stayed with him, and Moore came to dine with Wordsworth, without knowing this Mr. Monkhouse. It was a prodigious party, for there were Rogers, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Charles Lamb and his sister. "A clever fellow,

* Patmore's "My Friends and Acquaint

ances."

certainly," says Mr. Moore, "but full of villainous and abortive puns, which he miscarries of every minute." He told of his saying, on a young barrister getting his first brief, "Thou first great cause least understood." He praised Defoe's "Colonel Jack" warmly, and told Moore that he got £170 for two years' London Magazine contributions; "I thought more," writes Moore; and certainly it seems a slender payment. But the most delightfully characteristic of Moore's recollections, and deliciously after the Lamb manner, is the whim of making a collection of all the authors mentioned in the "Dunciad!" This is a real bit of Elia, translated into practical life-transmuted into the concrete, and that, too, without losing the bloom.

When he got with Haydon, the luckless painter of a "broad canvas," some one said they were like a pair of boys. The boisterous scene told in Haydon's diary, and told with such animation, of the simple comptroller of stamps, who had corresponded with Wordsworth, and who met him, unluckily, when Lamb was present, is admirable. The comptroller asked the poet the wonderful question, "Don't you think, sir, Newton was a great genius?" when Lamb rose, and taking up a candle, said, politely, "Sir, will you allow me to look at your phrenological development?" Then, at every remark of the poor comptroller, chaunted

"Diddle diddle dumpling, my son John Went to bed with his breeches on."

Quite in the same way is his humorous treatment of the poet whose friend had submitted some newly-published verses to his inspection. He was to meet the gentleman at dinner, and the poems were shown to Lamb a little before the author's arival. When he came he proved to be empty and conceited. During dinner Lamb fell into the delightful drollery of saying, now and again, "That reminds me of some verses I wrote when I was very young," and then quoted a line or two, which he recollected, from the gentleman's book, to the latter's amazement and indignation. Lamb, immensely diverted, capped it all by introducing the first lines of "Paradise Lost,” “Of man's first disobedience," as

also written by himself, which actually brought the gentleman on his feet, bursting with rage. He said he had sat by and allowed his own "little verses" to be taken without protest, but he could not endure to see Milton pillaged. This seems to be one of the best stories about Lamb, and the situation one in which he would have revelled.

A lady once bored him a good deal"Such a charming man! I know him! Bless him!" To her, Charles, after repetition of this encomium, "I know him,"

Well, I don't—but d- -n him at a hazard." The "dipping" story, as illustrative of Lamb's stammer, is well known. "I am to be d-d-dipped," he said to the bathing men. "All right, sir," and he was plunged forthwith. He came up gasping, "I am to be di-di-ppe-d," and he went down again. The third time he got it out-"only once." To some one, talking of matter-of-fact men, he announced gravely, "Now I am a matter-of-lie man." So, too, his taking his pipe out of his mouth, to ask a disputant, "did he mean to contend that a thief was not a good man?" So, too, his calling Voltaire a very good Messiah—for the French. So, too, his judgment on clever women. Mrs. Mulbald he pronounced the "only endurable clever woman he ever knew." A domestic talk with Miss Lamb, on his asking a friend: "Charles, who is Mr. Pitman?" "A clerk in the India House."

"Then why ask him and give up the others-older friends?" "Pitman." said Charles, "was always civil. When the smoking club at Don Saltero was broken up he offered me all the ornaments and apparatus, which I declined, and therefore I asked him here to-night. I never could bear to give pain. Have I not been called the gentle-hearted Charles when I was young, and shall I now derogate?"

We can almost hear him gravely arguing this point.

His puns must, we may fancy, have been the least agreeable phase of his wit. "I'll Lamb-pun him," however, is truly characteristic; besides we should hear the voice, the struggle for utterance, and see the face, and the bright eye and smile. Good, too, were the puns after Swift's manner-deriving the name of the Man-t-chou Tartars from their can